


We Don't Need No Education

by EarthScorpion



Series: Welcome to the Machine [1]
Category: Mage: The Ascension, World of Darkness (Games)
Genre: Conspiracy Theories, Cyborgs, Female-Centric, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Mages, Morally Ambiguous Character, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 11:15:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11334597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EarthScorpion/pseuds/EarthScorpion
Summary: When you fight the Man, sometimes you lose.  And then you're in the hands of machine men, with machine minds.But when you look around inside the system, you find it hard to see the people as the enemy.  If they want, they can seem very reasonable.  They have ways of making you talk - and ways of talking to you.  Which way they use depends on your utility as a future asset.Welcome to the machine.





	1. The First Week

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Panopticon](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/303243) by MJ12 Commando. 



**Day 1**  
  
“Hannah Gladson. Are you aware of just how much trouble you are in, young lady?”  
  
Hannah glares at him sullenly. Her head hurts. Her hand is in a cast. Her neck _doesn’t_ hurt for some reason, but she can feel it itching and there’s a large plaster stuck over her - hah! - her vampire bite marks. The plaster rubs against the black collar she’s wearing, which is probably some… some kind of tracking device. Or maybe an explosive charge. She’s tied to a chair, with her arms and legs secured. It’s even bolted to the floor, so she can’t even rock it. And they’ve been very careful to not let her anywhere near a pen.  
  
“This isn’t some display of high spirits. No, do you know what your little group was involved in? Do you know what you were involved in? Terrorism. Mass murder. Kidnapping. And in your case, illegal possession of a firearm.” The man pauses, raising one eyebrow. “Although that last charge pales in comparison to the rest.”  
  
He’s dressed up like a policeman. He’s acting like a policeman. But she knows he isn’t a policeman. Not a real one, at least, even if he holds a rank in the police. He’s a Technocrat and he’s just pretending to be a policeman for… for some reason. Probably to scare her. Probably because they don’t think she knows much about them.  
  
Hannah locks her teeth together. She’s not going to say anything.  
  
The man frowns. “I’m asking for you to cooperate,” he says, not unkindly. “We want to know if your terrorist cell has any other members who might carry out further atrocities. The casualty count over your attack on the hotel is over a hundred, and they haven’t finished counting the bodies yet. We just want to help save lives. Please, help us and we can help you.”  
  
She spits at him. The spit lands short, on the plain white table. He wrinkles his nose.  
  
She is taken off to a cell.

* * *

  
**Day 2**  
  
A broken man lies on the bed. He’s covered in electrodes and biosensors and bandages and all the paraphernalia of the medical wards. He is also securely attached to the bed with primium bands over his arms and chest.  
  
“Hmm. Adult, male. Touch and go for a while, but we’ve stabilised his condition. We’re keeping him in a medically induced coma. Have the bosses made up their minds yet about who gets him?”  
  
“Not yet. Just keep him alive.”

* * *

  
**Day 3**  
  
The meals here are bland institutional food. She’s watched when she eats, too. They know how her art works. They stop her from writing using the food. And then when she’s eaten, she has another talk with the man who calls himself ‘Constable Brown’. He’s still pretending to be a police officer. Everyone she sees is either dressed like a policeman or in suits. He keeps on trying to get her to ‘tell him about the other members of her cell’ and ‘stop further terrorist attacks’. And then he talks about how he understands she’s made mistakes and that she’s been lied to, and that if she cooperates she’s still young enough that there’s a chance she might not ruin her life entirely.  
  
Hannah has worked out why they’re pretending to be police. They’re trying to make her question herself. Make her believe she really has been arrested by the police, that she’s a naive little girl who’s been tricked by terrorists.  
  
She’d almost believe them. Almost. But they know too much. They know how to stop her from using her art. She tried to write in mashed potato yesterday. They let her. It didn’t work. She felt someone snuff out her magick. And then they just pretended that she hadn’t tried anything.  
  
It was like she didn’t matter at all. That they didn’t care that she had magick.  
  
She’s plotting out stories in her head when she’s stuck in her cell. It help keeps her sane. Helps her forget that she’s in the hands of the Technocratic Union. Helps her forget that they’ll try to brainwash her, that they’ll cut apart her head and put in computer chips which make her think what they want and… and… and she can’t stop them.  
  
There’s a cheap CRT television in her room, hidden behind a bulletproof glass layer. It’s controlled by buttons embedded in the wall. She’s flicked through it, and it only has a few channels. There’s all the 24 hour news channels, and that’s about it.  
  
She doesn’t turn it on, any more. She made that mistake earlier today.  
  
“We’re reporting here live from Brighton, where they’re still recovering victims of the largest single terrorist attack on British soil since-”  
  
“-the hospitals are filled to the brim with injured. Doctors say they’ve never seen so many gunshot victims before, that they’re pushed to their limits. The Army is moving specialists in to ease the overloaded-”  
  
“Public condolences are streaming in from around the world. One of the most prominent well-wishers has President Putin of Russia. At a moment like this, it’s hard to remember that just before the terrorist attack in Moscow, UK-Russia relations were at a low not seen since the Cold War with the incident in the Embassy in-”  
  
“-walking down the corridors, you can see dark stains on the walls and ground - reports, witnesses say, of how the terrorists gunned down people who tried to run.”  
  
“The Prime Minister will be making a public announcement at noon. Commentators say it is likely he will announce that the United Kingdom will moving to support the operations of the Russian Federation in Chechnya.”  
  
It’s probably all lies. It’s all lies. It has to be lies, right? No one would trust a TV in a Technocratic facility when you’re their captive. She’d turned it off, and promised never to turn it back on again. That way they couldn’t brainwash her using it.  
  
She has to get out of here. She… she doesn’t know where she’ll go. She won’t be able to go home because they know who she is. She doesn’t know if anyone else in her team made it out.  
  
Hannah thinks of Mel, and tries not to cry. She hopes she’s okay. She really… she doesn’t know what she’d do without Mel. But she has her magick and she can kill HITMarks and… and maybe she’s free right now and is planning an escape. And because she is an honest girl, Hannah is forced to concede that Melody probably isn’t _planning_ a rescue, because planning is not really a thing she does. Which means that the first sign that Mel has found her will probably be the explosions.  
  
She stares blankly at the white walls. No. She won’t sit here. Yes, she might not have writing materials, but she knows the truth! Her stories are just a way that her brain handles the fact that reality really is mutable! She can force the lock to the door to break! Karen explained all of this to her and Mel carefully, because if they ever ended up captured, they might need it.  
  
Hannah balls her hands into fists. She hopes Karen is okay. She… she was still fighting last thing Hannah knew, so she had to get away, right? And get revenge on the _traitor_ who betrayed her.  
  
Taking a deep breath, she examines the door to her cell. It’s a heavy metal door. She knows it has a bar outside, because she’s heard it scrape, but there’s also an automated mechanical lock. That’s not what she looks at, though. The hinges are her target.  
  
Goddamnit, she knows how it should go. If she had her materials, she’d be able to work on a story about her examining the locks and then focussing on the hinges and realising that they hadn’t been welded in properly. But without it out on paper or a screen, with all of it stuck in her head, it won’t work.  
  
That’s what Karen had said. ‘You know it won’t work’, she had told them. ‘Ignore that. Your brain is wrong. So is your heart. Make It Happen. Force it.’  
  
Clenching her teeth, Hannah puts her hands up against the hinges, and tries to force it. She can see it falling off in her mind’s eye. Yes. That’s what will happen. The door wasn’t made properly. It’ll conveniently fail right now.  
  
“Fall apart,” she mutters. “Break. Snap.”  
  
And nothing happens. It feels like she just walked into a glass door, that there’s something in the walls and door themselves which simply denies what she was trying. Gritting her teeth, she tries again and again, to no effect.  
  
Pain flares in her arms. Words are painting themselves into her arms in burns, words like _FAILURE_ and _LOSER_ and _NO WAY OUT_. She whimpers, trying to bite back a scream, but it hurts so much. It feels like someone is branding in each letter.  
  
Fuck Paradox. Fuck it. Of course a place like this is going to hurt her, especially when she tries to _force_ the world to change. And it didn’t even work.  
  
Hannah bursts into tears. She feels utterly drained, physically as well as mentally. She curls into a ball on her bed, and cradles her burnt arms.

* * *

  
**Day 4**  
  
The man lies on his bed. He hasn’t moved in days.  
  
“We have approval,” says one of the orderlies. “We’ve moving him to the labs.”  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“Yes. This one’s been assigned. We’re to prep him for ATLAS consideration.”  
  
“Hah. Fitting. Nasty piece of work, from his record.”  
  
“Yeah. You said it. Couldn’t happen to a nicer chap. Brought it on himself, really. Let’s get stuff moving, then.”

* * *

  
**Day 5**  
  
When Hannah wakes up, she’s fully dressed and sitting in a car. No, a limousine. The windows are blacked out, but she can tell that they’re moving. And she’s wearing normal clothes, too, not the white cotton pyjamas she was wearing in the cell. She panics. She can’t help herself. She spent all of yesterday in uncomfortable seats being asked firm questions by police officers. Over and over again.  
  
“Miss Gladson,” a woman says, in a notable East End accent. “Please, calm down.” The black woman sitting opposite to her is wearing a black suit and tie, and a white shirt. She has mirrored sunglasses protruding from one pocket. Her hair is fastened in neatly done cornrows. All in all, she looks like the very model of a young urban professional.  
  
“What’s… how…”  
  
“We had the medical orderlies at the police station dress you while you were asleep - they were women, I can reassure you - and then we’ve got an official transfer for you to a secure counterterrorism facility,” the agent says. “I’m sorry. We would have got you out of that police station earlier, but we were seeing if there would be any ill-thought-out attempts by the terrorists to capture you again.”  
  
Hannah clamps her jaw shut, and tries to stop herself from shaking. She’s in their hands now. She’s really being vanished.  
  
“I can understand that you’re scared,” the other woman says kindly. “I was utterly terrified when… no, wait, let’s start from the start.” She frowns. “Start from the beginning would probably have sounded better,” she says thoughtfully. “Oh well.” She coughs into her hand, clearing her throat.  
  
“I’m Julia Bran,” the woman says, and chuckles. “No, seriously, that’s actually my real name. People chuckle when they find I was born as a JB. My code name is Josephine Barrier. I’m a member of the Technocratic Union - specifically, I belong to the Watcher methodology of the New World Order. I’m specifically with CMPaM(Europe) - sorry, jargon. That’s Corporate Malfeasance Prevention and Monitoring, European division. My job is to make sure companies don’t start doing things like putting toxic products in goods or trying to sell haemophage - vampire to you - blood as a medicine so they can get people addicted.  
  
“But that’s not really very important to you, I bet,” she adds. “I’m the big bad Technocrat and you don’t really care that my job stops drug companies from selling wonder-drugs which happen to get you hopelessly addicted to them - and they totally would if they could get away with it, right?”  
  
Hannah forces herself to not nod along. They’re just trying to play her. Even if one of the powers of her magick is that she’s really good at telling when people try to lie to her, and she can tell that the woman is being honest here. She just crosses her arms, wincing when she knocks her still-present burns from the Paradox.  
  
“Well, here’s why it’s me talking to you,” Ms Bran says. “I volunteered. I heard about your circumstances on the grapevipe and I totally wanted to get a chance to talk to you, because… well, basically, seven years ago I was in the exact same position as you were.”  
  
“And you’ve been mind-controlled,” Hannah mutters.  
  
The other woman sighs. “I haven’t been,” she says. “They didn’t strap me to a chair and make me watch propaganda on loop while Beethoven played, they didn’t stick electrodes into my head, and they didn’t put a chip in my head. I know you’re scared. Terrified. You’ve been lied to, you know. The terrorist cell who picked you up and brainwashed you with their ideology, lied to you - Hannah, you do know they were the most dangerous extremist wing among the so-called Traditionalists, right? The Rogue Council?”  
  
The girl balls her hand into fists. “The Rogue Council is led by the Council of Nine! It’s the real Traditions!” she protests.  
  
“Do you want a drink? I see we’re going to be talking a lot,” Ms Bran says. “No? Okay. Well, the problem is, Hannah, that you’re fifteen. There hasn’t been a ‘real’ Council of Nine since before you were born. The Rogue Council is a hardline extremist sect which even the _moderate_ Traditionalists - the ones who might be on the other side from us and opposed to us, but sometimes have good points to make - the ones those Traditionalists think are crazy hardliners. It’s basically the Islamic State of the Traditions - the one even the other people who’d rather remove all modern Western women’s rights and enforce strict sharia law say is crazy.”  
  
She leans forwards to pat Hannah on the shoulder.  
  
“Don’t touch me,” Hannah hisses, biting her lip. They’re… she’s saying all these things.  
  
“Sorry, sorry. But that’s the thing, Hannah. You were picked up by a crazy extremist group and even more moderate Traditionalists would have tried to get you out of the sway of the Rogue Council. The Rogue Council is led by old, bitter men and women who can’t let go of a war which ended before you were born. They picked you up and tried to use you as a child soldier - and your friend, too.”  
  
Hannah turns white. “Mel,” she blurts out, and realises she probably shouldn’t have used the name. Her heart is pounding in her chest.  
  
Ms Bran leans forwards. “She’s badly hurt, but she’s alive,” she says. “Do you want to see her? Maybe I could arrange it, if you’re well-behaved.”  
  
The girl shrinks back in her seat. She shouldn’t have let that show. She shouldn’t have. If they knew… no. She won’t even think about it, in case they’re reading her mind. And now they’re using Mel as a tool in what they’re trying to do to her. “I won’t let you do this to me,” she groans, mostly to herself.  
  
“I honestly don’t know what you think we’re going to do to you,” Ms Bran says. “Now, yes, I will say that you are in a great deal of trouble. You were part of a terrorist attack which killed hundreds of people. But I promise you, the only reason we’ll cut open your head and put in cybernetic implants is if you ask for them. I don’t have any.” The woman stretches, leaning back in her seat. “I’m on your side here,” she says. “I see a young girl before me who’s been badly treated by people she trusted, who was tricked into being a terrorist, and I want to help you. Just like someone helped me.”  
  
“You’re going to brainwash me! Just like you were brainwashed!”  
  
“Well, perhaps I’ll tell you my story,” Ms Bran says. “Maybe it’ll sound familiar. I was just another kid, living out in Hackney. When I was fifteen, my mum got sick. Cancer. My dad wasn’t around and I had three younger brothers and sisters, so I had to wind up caring for them too just at the same time as I was doing my GCSEs.” She takes a deep breath. “It’s hard,” she says quietly. “When no one else seems to care about what you’re doing, but there’s all these expectations on you and you don’t have time for your friends and… well, the loneliness was the worst bit. My friends didn’t _get_ it. They didn’t understand how I couldn’t go out with them because I had to get home to make sure my brothers got fed and how there just wasn’t enough money and… well, I was crying one night because Mum was getting worse and I went crazy. At least, that’s what I thought was happening. Of course, that was my Genius developing.”  
  
Hannah flinches. She can’t help herself. It wasn’t exactly the same for her, but it hits so many of the same notes. The loneliness. The expectations. Not having any friends and somehow feeling that the world is _wrong_ but not knowing how to fix it or do anything.  
  
“I had no idea what I was doing,” Ms Bran says with a shrug. “I had no idea how to use my Genius. I pieced together a crude, hacked-together explanation from a mix of GCSE science and how I thought magic should work.” She shakes her head sadly. “I thought I was a witch,” she says. “I thought I was doing spells out of the back of cheap mass market occult books.”  
  
“You were!” Hannah blurts out. She takes a breath. “You _know_ you were doing magick. Down in your heart, you have to remember it. Magick is real!”  
  
Ms Bran smiles at her. “I remember being like that,” she says. “You know almost nothing about how to use your Genius. I didn’t either, when they picked me up. The thing is… look, there’s a way the world works. And then there’s deliberately breaking the laws of physics, damaging the world. Genius lets you do both things. Haven’t you ever noticed that when you do certain things, you can do them easily and nothing bad happens? I bet you’ve seen that you can write things and other people find them really persuasive, right?”  
  
In the background, the noise of the engine shifts.  
  
“I glanced through some of your stories. You’ve got an intuitive grasp of hyperpsychology. That’s not ‘magick’.” She says it distastefully, emphasising the ‘k’ sound. “That’s just psychology, performed with the kind of talent it takes Genius to do. Likewise, you’re clearly very clever and good with extrapolating behaviour from limited data. That’s a valuable skillset, but you have to realise that you’re not actually making your stories come true. That’s just your brain tricking itself as it tries to handle getting used to hyperstat data analysis. It’s not your fault for falling back on that kind of method. Getting used to having Genius takes work. I’m betting that with the right training, you won’t _need_ to write stories to carry out rapid statistical analysis.”  
  
Hannah blinks. “No, no,” she protests, “that’s just because some things are vulgar and some things are… are coincidental.” She tries to repress the flicker of temptation. She’s felt jealous before of the others and how… how they could just _do_ things on the fly. If she’d been able to do her magick without having to write a paragraph, maybe she could have changed how things had turned out. Maybe she could… no! It’s a Technocratic trick! They’re trying to persuade her to use their magic, not her own! They’re… they’re trying to persuade her that she’s been doing their magick all along!  
  
“It’s the same kind of thing which happened in history, you know,” Ms Bran tells her. “We had the alchemists. You’ve probably met some, right?”  
  
She nods, before she can stop herself. “Yes,” she admits.  
  
“Well, that’s what happened in history. The alchemists found what worked, and that’s what became chemistry. The stuff that didn’t work? Doesn’t work. There are things which work because they’re not breaking reality to do so, and then there are the things which require breaking reality to work. That’s why we call it Reality Deviancy. Anyone can try mixing things up and they won’t be able to turn lead into gold, because that requires particle accelerators and… things like that, I’m not an expert. But you can’t do it with chemistry. Ah!” she says, raising a finger, “But you’re probably about to say that it can be done with ‘magick’, right?”  
  
The girl folds her arms. “It can. I’ve seen it done.”  
  
“And that’s _misusing_ the natural talent of Genius, using it to break the world. I bet you noticed doing things which weren’t possible produced strange events happening, right? Like the burns on your arms?”  
  
Unconsciously, Hannah hugs her arms close defensively. “That’s Paradox, produced by the… the weight of the Consensus! Because you lie to people!”  
  
“Hannah, Hannah, Hannah,” Ms Bran says, shaking her head. “Do you really, really think that what people believe changes the way the world works? Or is that just something you tell yourself because it gives you hope? Think about it sensibly. How many people take antibiotics to try to cure a viral infection? If medicine worked because people believed it worked, why wouldn’t antibiotics cure viruses? Or think about all those traditionalists in the US who think that God will strike down people who support gay marriage. Why is San Francisco still intact, if that’s really the case? If belief really determined reality, why aren’t haemophages scared of crosses and repulsed by garlic?”  
  
Hannah works her jaw. She doesn’t know. She… no! Things worked fine in a safehouse! A place where the paradigm didn’t stop her from changing things with writing. She has to stay strong and ignore these rhetorical tricks and… and she shouldn’t think about them.  
  
“Really, Hannah,” Ms Bran says, “‘Paradox’ and ‘Consensus’ are just a tool of propaganda by extremist groups who want the freedom to break reality and damn the consequences for anyone else. They’re a way of shifting the blame for why breaking reality produces an ‘immune response’ from the people who chose to break it to the innocent civilian population. Don’t you think that’s a bit selfish?  
  
She sighs. “But we’re getting distracted,” she admits. “I was talking about me, and how I wound up where I am now. See, I started off just wanting to help people. And things seemed to be going good.” Her shoulders slumped. “For me, at least. See, while I was also helping make my Mum better by helping her with little mixes of drugs, I was also misusing my talent. I’d started sacrificing mice I caught in traps to do things - because I was a witch, right? And then someone from the Verbena found me, and things started getting worse. I was vulnerable, you see, and I didn’t know how to use my Genius and they gave me easy answers.” She trails off.  
  
“What happened?” Hannah asks. The other woman looks distressed, even upset. This isn’t what she thought would happen. She thought she was going to be locked in just another cell, not moved around in a comfy limo talking to a New World Order agent who’s spilling her life story.  
  
Ms Bran looks awkward. “It’s just a bit hard to admit to,” she says uneasily. “You… you might just about remember a big case seven years ago? A big manhunt for a missing girl? I was… I was involved with that. And not on the good side. I didn’t kill her, but I knew who did it and I knew why he did it. He was using her as part of a big ritual I was involved in. Leading it. They put her in… you know the film? The Wicker Man? One of those.” She takes a deep breath, licking her lips. “Anyway, the Union showed up showed up too late, and the… the thing, the alien _thing_ we’d allowed into reality was already through. It was like a man, but he had deer horns and… and the look in his eyes was… I still have nightmares.”  
  
There is silence in the car.  
  
“They killed it, stopped it from rampaging,” Ms Bran says after a pause, “and they caught me when I tried to run for it. And then I wound up in a chair much like this, with a kind woman explaining just what I’d done wrong and how the creature had killed several other people beyond… beyond the sacrifice. I didn’t… well, you know how it is. You didn’t mean to hurt anyone, right? You were so sure that what you did was right. You didn’t think that… that something like that would happen. And then it happens and you’re suddenly a murderer and you’re wondering where it all went wrong.  
  
Hannah swallows. She can tell when people are lying, and Ms Bran isn’t lying. She wishes she was. She wishes it was just a story which she’d made up to try to persuade her that the Technocracy wasn’t the bad guys. But she isn’t lying. And it does hit too close to home. She… she hadn’t wanted people to die. Not normal people. The attack… it had just been there to kill the Technocrats there, but they were the bad guys, right?  
  
Right?  
  
Ms Bran smiles at her. “So that’s why I’m here,” she tells Hannah. “I know exactly what you’re going through. It hurts and it feels dreadful and you feel bad and you feel bad about feeling bad because what you did was what you thought was right and now you’re not sure.  
  
“But… but it was the right thing,” she manages. She wrings her hands in her lap. “We… we were just doing it to… to punish the Technocrats who… who killed all those people. That’s what they said.”  
  
“Is that why they shot the hostages?” Ms Bran asks. “Maybe what you thought you were doing wasn’t what your bosses really meant to do.”  
  
Hannah has no answer.

* * *

  
**Day 6**  
  
The man lies in a new bed. He has been moved between facilities, but just to look at his windowless room, you couldn’t tell that. The room is identical to the last one, with its identical walls and its identical machinery and its identical wires and its identical Men in Black security.  
  
“We have an estimated time of around thirty six hours for the completion and delivery of a suitable braincase,” a white-coated doctor says.  
  
His companion chuckles. “That’ll certainly make it harder for him to wear a trenchcoat,” she says darkly, to a snort from the doctor.

* * *

  
**Day 7**  
  
The new facility is much more pleasant, Hannah thinks, and hates herself for it. But it’s true. Her room is more comfortable, with a larger bed and walls which aren’t a bland white. She has a shower and more space and there’s even some kind of advanced exercise machine which can be a bike, a rowing machine or a running machine. The television is much bigger and has channels she actually doesn’t mind watching. She can almost ignore that they’re watching her all the time.  
  
It’s an illusion of privacy, but it helps. It’s like being in a hotel room, rather than a prison cell.  
  
They’re still not trusting her with paper or a computer, though.  
  
Today she’s having lunch with Ms Bran. The food is excellent - it’s comparable to fancy meals that she’s had out to celebrate her father managing some big trade. The view from the window suggests that they’re in central London, although it might be a trick. She hasn’t forgotten that she’s a captive of the Technocratic Union.  
  
“But the Technocracy does horrible things!” she protests. “It destroys cultures! It supports slavery, it keeps Third World nations poor, it… it’s the reason the West can get away with acting how it does!”  
  
Ms Bran sighs, and takes a sip from her drink. “I’m not going to lie to you,” she says. “You’re a smart girl and if you found out I’d just been lying through my teeth, you’d never trust me again. The Union - and the Order of Reason before it, hundreds of years ago - has made mistakes. Lots of mistakes. That’s what you get when you have an organisation which has existed in various forms since the 1200s.” She pauses, loading up her fork with linguini. “I can’t say I like what it did in the Fifties and Sixties, either. I’ve read up about that time. If you ask me, I think both the Union and the Traditions were traumatised by the Second World War. It took both of them a long time to get over it.”  
  
Hannah points at her with her fork. “The Technocracy backed the Nazis!” she points out.  
  
“Some Unionists backed the Nazis, yes,” Ms Bran concedes. “So did a lot of Traditionalists. People sided with their own nationalities, you know. You had German Technocrats and German Unionists fighting on the same side against Russian Unionists and Russian Traditionalists and…” she shrugs, “I don’t really understand the politics in depth, but the Russian Union and the Western Union weren’t the best friends at the time and some American and British and other ‘Allied’ Unionists thought that the Nazis might be better than the Communists. The same mistake lots of other people made.  
  
She sighs. “That doesn’t make it not a mistake, but it is sort of understandable. It’s like how the Order of Reason first backed the transatlantic slave trade, and then - when it realised that this had been a horrible, horrible mistake - was behind the British efforts to stamp it out. And we backed Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War to defeat the slave-owners and their ‘traditional values’.”  
  
“And the entire modern economic system?” Hannah demands. “That’s still happening! You can’t justify how the West lives just… just by talking about what you did hundreds of years ago!”  
  
Ms Bran sips at her fruit juice. “I _wish_ we controlled the world’s economy,” she says.  
  
“Are you saying you don’t?!”  
  
“Yes. I’m saying we don’t control it. We can influence it, yes, but control it? No. Come on, Hannah. Haven’t you found how hard it is to carry out hyperstat forecasts on several people at once? The number of variables increases so much.”  
  
“I know it’s hard to cast spells on lots of people,” Hannah mutters.  
  
“That’s the problem,” Ms Bran says ignoring her. “There are seven billion people in the world. We can’t keep track of what everyone is doing, even if we tried. The reason people exploit other people to make money is because… well, humans like money. Hell, remember what I told you? My day job is to monitor companies and _stop_ them from doing things like selling haemophage blood as a drug.”  
  
There is an awkward silence as the two of them eat. Ms Bran pours herself more juice. “You know,” she says, “I don’t think I really told you what happened when I was new here,” she says.  
  
Hannah glares at her sullenly.  
  
“I was seventeen at the time,” she says, “and… well, remember I told you what my family life was like the day before yesterday. Well, the Union has a lot of ways it helps its members. My mother’s cancer cleared up, and she got a new job which paid much better. They found my dad and got the child support payments from him. And I got found by a ‘second chance gifted and talented’ programme and they found me a very good college which’d take me in even with my bad GCSEs. Although the private tutors they got me worked me to the bone to bring my maths up to standard. Which, heh, wouldn’t be a problem you’d have.”  
  
“What’s your point?” Hannah asks bluntly. Oh, she knows what the point is. They’re hinting at how they can bribe her. She just want to see if they’ll admit it.  
  
“If they can get someone like me into a good college - and then into a top grade uni with a Union scholarship - they can _certainly_ do the same for you,” Ms Bran says casually. “Oh, don’t look like that. I read up on your school reports. Bright, imaginative, a prodigy at English - but problems with bullying and no close friends. No wonder the Rogue Council managed to pick you up. They told you that you really were better than other people, and they made you feel like you belonged. Like you had a cause.”  
  
Hannah leaps to her feet. Her glass goes flying, sending juice spilling all over the table. “Get out of my head!” she growls.  
  
Ms Bran shakes her head sadly. “I can’t read minds. I told you I’d been in the same place as you. That’s just what the Verbena did for me. And then they had me burn a girl to death in a ‘magick ritual’ which let an alien through into the world.” She sighs. “That’s how they prey on you. When you’re lonely and the world doesn’t seem to understand you, they’re there. Because they make you feel special. Because they make it seem like the whole world is your enemy, and because life hasn’t treated you the best, that seems to make sense.” She pauses, grabbing a napkin. “Here, let me mop that up,” she says.  
  
Hannah sits and stews. She knows what they’re doing. She’s not stupid! She can tell that they’re just… just trying to turn her against her friends! And just because they’ve managed to brainwash people who might have been similar to her before doesn’t mean it’ll work on her!  
  
And even if _some_ Technocrats might seem to be okay people, the entire organisation is bad and corrupt and evil and… and bad!


	2. The Second Week

**Day 8**  
  
The laser cutter makes a deep humming noise. The whole room smells of a mix of antiseptic compounds, ozone, and just a hint of burned flesh before the extractor fans catch it. The remote operated claw picks up the removed limb, and places it next to its partners in the coolant fluid.  
  
From behind the darkened glass, the doctors make their notes.  
  
“Right arm successfully excised,” the team lead notes. “Excellent job, people. How are we for bleeding?”  
  
“No bleeding. The biofilm has successfully bonded to the stump.”  
  
“Excellent. Bloom, get those limbs to Iterator Li. He wants to take a look at the EDE traces they’ve got integrated into them.” He purses his lips. “Okay, everyone, I’m ordering a break. We’re getting tired, and I don’t want anyone making mistakes with the next bit. There’s something _very_ strange about his skull, and we’ll need to move carefully. That thing will need to be decontaminated before we can proceed with MMI implantation. Oh, and people? This time, remember we also need to leave space for the cortex bomb.”

* * *

  
**Day 9**  
  
There’s someone else waiting for her in the meeting room this time. It’s a pale, pretty - okay, drop-dead gorgeous - woman with black hair. She smiles at Hannah when she comes in, closing her laptop. She’s dressed much more casually than the other people Hannah has seen in this facility, in a navy blue skirt and very fluffy white jumper. There is also a little grey and black kitten sitting on the table, staring at her with mad blue eyes. Hannah can’t help but smile at the sight of it.  
  
Despite that, though, there’s something about the woman which both repulses and allures Hannah. Unconsciously, her nostrils flare as she tries to work out what’s so familiar about her.  
  
“You don’t need to stand around,” the woman tells her, with the same sunny smile. “You can sit down. Don’t worry, I got a cushion. These seats are kind of hard, aren’t they? I sometimes think the NWO,” she says it ‘en-woh’, “believe in making people sit up straight to improve their posture or something.”  
  
Warily, Hannah sits. “Um. Hello,” she tries. She isn’t sure what’s going on. But at least this woman doesn’t seem threatening and she isn’t one of the suits. Which probably means she’s here to be the ‘good cop’ or something, but at least that means she won’t do anything nasty to Hannah and since she _knows_ this is probably the the good cop, she can watch out for any traps. “Where’s Ms Bran?”  
  
“My name’s Rose,” says the woman. Hannah has problems identifying her accent. It certainly isn’t British. It sounds European, though. Maybe Italian? The way she says ‘Rose’ sounds almost like she’s saying ‘Rosa’. It’s certainly quite… cute, and Hannah wonders where that thought came from. “I just wanted to have the chance to talk to you.”  
  
Where she knows her from suddenly clicks, and Hannah’s eyes widen in panic. “You’re… you’re the vampire!” she shouts, falling off her chair and landing heavily on her bottom. She tries to shuffle away, but she knows it won’t help. That thing can chase her down. That… that pretty, smiling, normally-dressed thing. “You bit me!”  
  
“I’m not a vampire!” Rose blurts, sounding outraged. “No, really! I’m as alive as you are!”  
  
“You bit me!” Hannah repeats, because it’s a fairly important point.  
  
“Well, yes,” Rose admits. “That’s the best way I could think up to knock you out without hurting you worse. I could have strangled you, but that could have caused brain damage and that would have been horrible! Even if I was really angry at the time because I was just having dinner and you were trying to hurt Donald! I’m calm now, though! But I’d like to make it clear that I’m not a vampire! I didn’t drink any of your blood! And I’m not a horrible monster!”  
  
She takes a breath. “And I promise I won’t move from sitting here if you don’t want me to. I’m not trying to scare you.” She looks sad. “I don’t like scaring people.”  
  
With a mew, her kitten jumps down off the table and into Hannah’s lap. The little thing stares at her with wide eyes, and then settles down after only a little bit of stretching. It’s so out of place that Hannah almost forgets that she’s scared. Of all the things that she expected to see in a Technocratic facility, a friendly kitten was pretty low down the list.  
  
“Um. What’s she doing?” Rose asks. “I’m sorry, I only got her recently and she’s still getting used to me. Is she being a bother?”  
  
Hannah blinks. “She… uh, seems to have gone to sleep on my lap,” she says, feeling calm. Perhaps it’s fatalism. Or proximity to a cat.  
  
“Oh dear. She’s so shameless about finding warm places to nap. She’s such a silly kitty.”  
  
Scooping the kitten up - something she’s entirely used to from her parents’ cats - Hannah warily approaches the table again. She doesn’t sit yet. “Y-you bit me and… and you broke my hand and… and y-you killed all those people,” she says quietly.  
  
“I know,” Rose agrees. “You did have a gun, though! I didn’t want to hurt you, but I didn’t know what you had loaded in that. “And as for the rest…” Rose looks momentarily sad. “I hate violence and killing,” she says, biting her lip. “I wish I never had to do it. I like helping people. I’m a really good doctor, you know!” Her words have the ring of truth about them, Hannah realises with a dawning sense of mild horror. There’s… there’s no way she can be the same person that was that _thing_ back in the hotel? Right? “But I had to stop them killing more people. And they were going to kill my mother and my friends.”  
  
“What kind of thing are you?” she breaths.  
  
“I’m a person, not a thing,” Rose says.  
  
“But you had glowing eyes and… and you were all…”  
  
“I just have some modifications to make me better at hunting… well, vampires as a big thing. It means I can use some of their biological powers, and I can blend in as a cover. But that doesn’t make me like them! That’s why I came here. I wanted to say sorry for not finding a better way to incapacitate you. I could have, normally. But I was having dinner and didn’t have any sedatives, so I had to use my fangs to inject a sedative.” She swallows. “And if I was mean, I just said it in the heat of the moment. I was very angry.”  
  
This is so entirely backwards that Hannah has no context for what’s going on. The scary vampire thing is… a very pretty woman who comes in to apologise. Apologise to _her_ after she tried to kill her, she thinks, turning slightly red. Something doesn’t add up. “Um,” she tries. “I’m sorry too,” she says, because it’s the best thing she can think of at the moment.  
  
Wait, no, why is she apologising to the Technocrat?  
  
Rose smiles at her, and Hannah feels her heart leap in her chest. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” Rose says. “Everything is better when people try to talk things out, rather than attack each other! Here, I’ll tell you something about myself, and then you can tell me something about you. Well, um, for one, I’m called Rose Ashford. I’m a member of the Progenitors. I belong to the Methodology - that’s a sub-group - called Damage Control. And that’s what I do. I help protect doctors and researchers. Most of my family works in Damage Control, apart from my mother. One of my big brothers is a Senior Constable in Ethical Compliance, and that means his job is to make sure that the scientists don’t do unsafe things and that they follow all the rules about proper protocols for handling things which could be dangerous.”  
  
Hannah’s heard of Damage Control, vaguely. They were where the Progenitors kept their combat monsters. Things like uplifted apes and clone armies and cloned t-rexes with flamethrower breath which were actually a cover story for the fact that they were using dragons. Her mental model hadn’t really had space for things like ‘families’ and ‘lab safety’. “How long have you been doing this?” she asks, petting the kitten cradled in her arms.  
  
“Um… about four years,” Rose says. “I can’t say it’s always been easy, but my current role is the best and I really like everyone I work with and my boss is the best one I’ve ever had. She’s from the New World Order and pretends to be a bit of a grump and works herself too hard, but she really cares about all of us. She’s not at all like the New World Order you’ve probably been told about.” Rose pauses. “Well, maybe a bit, but only in a good way!”  
  
The girl feels a little bit lost under the waves of relentless enthusiasm and obvious happiness from the bouncy woman. She sits down, shifting the kitten down to her lap. The little thing protest a bit, but snuggles into her with a faint mew. “What do you mean?” she asks.  
  
“Have you been told what the Conventions really are like?”  
  
Hannah nods. Ms Bran did that yesterday. And… she grits her teeth, and reminds herself it’s not ‘what the Conventions really are like’, it’s ‘the propaganda they’re telling her’. She has to keep track of that. As long as she remembers they’re trying to brainwash her and keeps track of what they’re doing it won’t work on her.  
  
“Well, my boss, Director Belltower, treats everyone the same regardless of where they came from, which is a big thing the NWO are into. In my amalgam - my team - there are people who were born into the Union because their parents were members, there are constructs, there are people recruited by the Union straight away and there are defectors and she doesn’t care where you came from, she cares about who you are and what you can do! Isn’t that nice?”  
  
There’s something which has been bugging her, now that she thinks about it. “Is… like, most of the Technocracy female?” she asks, and blushes. “It’s just… um, I’ve only really talked to women and there were… um, and there were a lot of women with you at dinner and… um…” she trails off.  
  
Rose smiles broadly. It’s an infectious smile, and Hannah can’t help smiling back. “Well, the Order of Reason was in favour of equal rights hundreds and hundreds of years ago, long before the Masses started doing it. So there’s been a long-term culture of treating women fairly,” Rose says happily. “Some of the greatest heroes of the Order of Reason and the Technocratic Union have been women. I’m related to one of them, Lady Reina Lior, who was a vampire slayer and monster hunter and also basically invented the concept of power armour.” She smiles to herself and Hannah isn’t quite sure why she’s smiling like that. “She’d like the armour your friend was wearing.”  
  
Hannah blinks. “My friend?” she asks, confused.  
  
“The girl your age! Melody! I’ve talked to her already, when I was helping her with her knee. Poor girl. She’s not taking things very well and seems quite unhappy with what she did in the hotel,” Rose says, lowering her voice. “Maybe I could see if you could talk with her and cheer her up a bit?  
  
She feels her heart catch in her throat. She wants to see Mel again, so much. But she… they’ll use it against her. “M-maybe,” she stammers, averting her eyes.  
  
“So I told you a little bit about me,” Rose says, “and then we got distracted. So why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself? I like to get to know new people.”  
  
Hannah glances back at the other woman and her expectant gaze. She seems so nice and… and Hannah doesn’t want to disappoint her. She wants her to like her. And if she’s talking about herself - just small things, things they could get from her school records - then she isn’t talking about anything important. She cuddles the kitten on her lap, and takes a deep breath.  
  
And before she knows it, she’s opening up to those pretty eyes and smile and talking about how she has no friends and nothing feels right and she’s an only child and her parents don’t understand how she doesn’t want to do things with others and they don’t understand how she can just lock herself in her room and read and her mother wants her to go to parties and she doesn’t like crowds and all her thoughts come out.

* * *

   
**Day 10**  
  
“Okay, guys. The chassis has finally arrived, so we can move on to stage three of the procedure.”  
  
In a tank of greenish fluid in the middle of the room, a broken man floats. His skull has been opened up, and now wires protrude from his exposed brain. A breathing pipe protrudes from his mouth, pumping in oxygenated fluid. If he was removed from the tank, his lungs would collapse. This is viewed as a desirable feature. Likewise, his arms and legs have been surgically removed.  
  
They were smashed and broken, and it wasn’t like he was going to be using them again.  
  
“I’m going to have to request you delay for at least eighteen hours,” says a second Indian-accented speaker.  
  
“Oh, and why is that, Dr Biri?”  
  
“We’re having to repeat the C-S cycle. Annoyingly, he preserved unacceptable levels of memory function even after the in-depth scrubbing. You realise this is completely unacceptable.”  
  
“How on earth did that happen? Well, never mind that. Surely you can continue the C-S cycle once he’s in the ATLAS?”  
  
“Protocols specifically forbid that. Better safe than sorry, Dr Belmore.”  
  
“Well, I suppose you’re right.” The woman sighs. “He gets to stay in the tank a little longer. How annoying. I had hoped to get started today.”

* * *

   
**Day 11**  
  
Her questioning and faked compliance has had some success. They’ve let her see Melody, after she tricked them into thinking that she’d be more pliable if she had proof that her friend was okay.  
  
Yes. She’s sure that it was… it’s that she’s just faking it. Even if she really wants to see Mel. Maybe… maybe she’ll feel less uncertain, less wobbly once she’s seen her friend.  
  
Melody is still in a hospital bed. Admittedly, it’s a very pleasant hospital bed, well-lit and ventilated, and the machinery around her is clearly expensive. There’s a doctor in here with them - no, Hannah corrects herself, it’s a man in a white lab coat. That doesn’t make him a doctor. He could be security as well. Although considering what Rose had been like, both a doctor and an incredibly dangerous fighter, maybe he is a doctor and security as well.  
  
“Hannah!” Melody says as soon as she sees her, her big blue eyes wide. Her blonde hair is lank and messy and a bit sweaty, but Hannah has never been so glad to see her. “You’re all right!”  
  
Hannah swallows, and crosses over the room, to take the chair by the bed. “Not quite,” she says, raising her cast. “I… how are you doing?”  
  
Melody takes a deep breath. “I can’t walk,” she says, and gives a weak chuckle. “Han… my… my knee isn’t working. There… there was a ‘dox and then this machine-thing showed up and it was going after me and nothing I did helped and…” she trails away. “I nearly died,” she says weakly. “They saved me and… and… and I’m not a magical girl.” Her voice cracks and the last words come out in a wail.  
  
“It’ll… you are!” Hannah insists, her heart pounding. No. No. She can’t cry like this. She can’t deny her magic. She’s… she’s _seen_ Melody create fireballs from thin air. She takes her friend’s hand. “What did they do to you?”  
  
“Nothing. Th-that’s the thing. That last… upgrade Karen got me. It… it was Union power armour. They… they managed to just take control of it. Before the machine showed up. The two girls. They… they were Iterators. They laughed at me for… for being so stupid,” Melody says quietly. “And then they… they just shut it down.”  
  
Hannah squeezes her hand. “You have magick,” she insists. “I’ve seen you!”  
  
“M-maybe it was just tricks all along,” Melody says, in that same brokenhearted tone. “They… they showed me the videos of the armour and… and how it’s hurt a lot of the operators. I got… angry. I tried to… to use a Wondrous Cleansing Note on them. And… and it didn’t work. It didn’t even fail or… or anything. It just didn’t work. M-maybe the power had just come from the… the armour and the wands and all the… the other things they gave me.” She locks her eyes on Hannah. “I even tried to… to force it. Like Karen showed us. But it didn’t work. M-maybe it never worked.”  
  
“It works!” Hannah insists. No, she can’t do this. She can’t watch her friend like this. She wants to do something to stop it. Something. Anything.  
  
Melody gives a sick, bubbling chuckle which is more of a sob. “I’m jealous of you,” she says. “You… your powers… they’re not reliant on… on technology. If… if everything I had was coming from t-techology, and I don’t have it any more… what can I do? I… I can’t fight them. And… and I’ve been watching the news.” She swallows. “It’s… all our fault that so many people are dead.”  
  
Hannah flinches. “It’s… it’s…”  
  
“One of them threw herself at the machine to try to save me,” Mel says softly, staring up at the ceiling. “Even… even when I had been just about to kill them. And… and I… I’ve seen the news.” Tears begin to leak from her eyes. “I… I just wanted to help people,” she whispers. “I… I thought we were the good guys. But… b-but everything I did was j-just lies. M-maybe we were just wrong. About everything. M-my m-magick w-was just t-t-technology. I thought I… I was Usagi. But… but maybe I was Fate. Only not grown in a tank.” She gives a weak smile. “I’ve been such a fool,” she says, and chuckles and sniffs at the same time.  
  
“Uh,” Hannah says. She doesn’t feel quite able to respond to that. She wants to hug Mel and tell her friend - one of her only friends, to be honest - that they had been helping people, that just because she was using power armour doesn’t mean she doesn’t really have magick. After all, they both know that Technocratic hypertech is just a form of magick too. But the words don’t come. If she was writing, she’d be able to produce some flowery speech and everything would turn out okay. If she just had half an hour to work on her response, she’d be able to nail it. If she didn’t have her heart turning loops in her chest she could think clearly.  
  
But in person, she can’t think of anything to say. She’s not good with real people. And… and it’s hard to hate the Technocracy when she’s met Technocrats in person. They seem to be just people - nice people, even, people who seem to really think that they’re helping people and… and they don’t _seem_ brainwashed. It’s hard to blame them for everything bad she _knows_ the Technocracy has done when they _admit_ that it made lots of mistakes.  
  
“They want me to join,” Mel says, not looking at her friend. “One of the girls I… I was going to shoot came in. The French one. She was very understanding and… and she said I looked like I had natural talent with power armour. She… she said I was amazing to be able to pilot the… the magical girl thingie with no training. She… she showed me the variant of it she uses, and… and it might look more sentai than shoujo, but… but it’s safer, she says. And she showed me footage from her last mission. Th-they’d been fighting alien p-p-possessed werewolves. R-really horrible things.  
  
She rubs her eyes. It doesn’t help much. “Wh-when they’re killing alien w-werewolves and w-we’re k-killing normal p-p-people in a hotel,” she sobs, “I… I don’t think we’re the good guys.”

* * *

   
**Day 12**  
  
“Beginning initialisation test procedure. Computer, begin recording. Title: Tee Pee Zero Zero One - start up. Attempt one. Begin main body.” The woman clears her throat. “Subject Oh-Nine-Seven has been configured and installed in a AR-variant ATLAS chassis. We are now beginning Test Procedure 001 to test for basic start up and shut down functionality. Belmore, begin the test.”  
  
On the other side of the glass, the technical staff scurry back behind their protective shields. They’re getting out of the way of the figure in the centre of the room, the figure surrounded by waldos and servos and containment foam sprayers. The hulking figure of shining metal. The figure that has within its barrel torso the organs of a man and within its metal skull the brain of a man.  
  
“Actuators online.”  
  
“We’re getting green from MMI interface.”  
  
“System locks are solid.”  
  
“We’re… abort! I repeat, abort! Unstable delta wave patterns!”  
  
A big red button gets slammed, and tubes eject from ports on the ATLAS chassis.  
  
“Attempt one is a failure,” says the woman on the other side of the glass. “I want a full analysis of the failure before we continue.”

* * *

   
**Day 13**  
  
Today, she’s been allowed out of the confined area she’s been kept before. Ms Bran has taken her to lunch in the general eating areas.  
  
It’s very… office-y. There are lots of people here in suits and ties. Over on the far side of the room, a bunch of bulky men laugh loudly.  
  
Ms Bran guides her away from those people. “I hate those guys,” she mutters to Hannah. “We were on the same project for a while and they spent all their time talking about going to the gym and their rugby games. When they were meant to be working, thank you very much. Men!”  
  
Despite herself, Hannah smiles. It’s the first time she’s smiled in a while. After seeing Melody like that, she’s been fretting, thinking about what’s happening again and again. Mel… she can’t help her. Even if she could find a way to get out - and she hasn’t managed it yet - and to get Mel out from her hospital bed… she says her magick doesn’t work any more. Maybe they’ve brainwashed her already - but it was still Mel. It wasn’t someone else. And even if she got out of here, she doesn’t know anyone and she can’t run and there’s nowhere safe to go to and… and they’d just hunt her down again. They probably have tracking beacons or something.  
  
And even if she escaped on her own, Melody is… is probably going to become a Technocrat and she doesn’t know what she’d do without her. Her chest feels all tight when she even thinks about it.  
  
“Julia!” a man calls out from a table. “We’ve got space over here!”  
  
“Hi Tom!” Ms Bran calls back. “I’ll need space for two! I’m showing someone around!”  
  
By the time they get back, space has been made at the table, and Hannah sits down, feeling very out of place. She’s surrounded by young, happy-looking Technocrats who obviously all know each other and are friends and… and they just feel at ease with each other. They don’t seem to be stressing about being chased or… or anything.  
  
“Everyone, this is Hannah,” Ms Bran says. “Hannah, everyone. I’ve been showing her around for the past few days, explaining a few things about the Union, you know that sort of thing. So I guess everyone should introduce themselves and what they do.”  
  
“Heya,” a tiny Chinese woman says, Mexican wrap in hand. “Xiaolian. I’m with the Syndicate… I’m a financier. My current project is to do with a way to try to make sure that crowdfunding projects actually produce the goods they’ve been paid to make - there’s just too much fraud in the system at the moment.”  
  
Hannah blinks. “Wait. But… I thought… isn’t the Syndicate opposed… it’s all about the big businesses.”  
  
Xiaolian smiles widely. “Have you been listening to Julie and her stick-up-the-arse NWOisms?” she says teasingly. “I know she’s a little bitter from how much of her time is spent trying to get big businesses to behave, but there’s no need to slander our good name. We’ve been involved in it from the start. If we can get it working properly - you realise what this would mean? It means the market works much better, because it means people can get what they _want_ , not just what is guaranteed a return. The Syndicate is in favour of markets which work _well_ and we know there’s a lot of problems with the current model. That’s why we try to improve things.”  
  
“Ignore her,” Ms Bran says archly. “She’ll go on about it for _hours_ if you acknowledge her.”  
  
“It’s true,” one of the men says, running a hand through his floppy blonde hair. “Don’t worry, though. She’s a Syndic, so she can’t see you if you don’t have any money on you and…” he catches a thrown napkin. “Tom Banks, I’m a Void Engineer, in the Neutralisation Specialist Corps. How to explain what I do… well, uh, this is going to sound silly, but basically I’m a ghostbuster.”  
  
He pauses.  
  
“... you didn’t start humming the theme music,” he notes.  
  
“She’s fifteen,” Ms Bran points out.  
  
“... urgh, now I feel old,” he says. “Wait. Oh God. That means she was born after the Matrix came out.” He suddenly smirks. “At least you got less Mr Anderson jokes from her, eh, Julie? Well, anyway. Yeah, I met Julie when she called us in after she found a company called Orpheus was basically murdering people to transfer their consciousnesses into RNEs… Residual Noetic Entities, which are a form of Extradimensional Entity.”  
  
“That was a nasty case,” Ms Bran says.  
  
“Yeah, not nice,” he agrees.  
  
“Imogen… Immie to my friends,” says an overweight brown-haired woman. “I’m in Iteration X, I’m a biomechanicist, and I work in a company developing new prosthetic limbs. It’s really great! We’ve made great leaps forwards in the past few years. We now have thought controlled opposing thumbs and they reliably work. The extra funding from governments over the past decade or so has been a lot of use - there are double-amputees who’re up to… like, 70% functionality with our high end stuff.”  
  
“How come you didn’t grump about her talking about her stuff?” Xiaolian mutters.  
  
Everyone ignores her. “Jacques,” says a French-accented man. “I’m actually Canadian… from Quebec, in case you were wondering, but I’m working here in the UK at the moment. I spend my days stuck among cancer samples, trying to see if the latest new drug kills it or stops it growing. And doesn’t, you know, kill healthy cells too much. I’m a Progenitor, in case you didn’t realise.”  
  
They’re all staring at her. “Hannah,” she says, in a tiny voice. She doesn’t know what else to say. She’s not good with people and they’re all… all telling the truth about what they do and they look like they enjoy their work and… and if someone killed them that would be bad because they’re doing good things and what do they mean, the Technocracy _likes_ crowdfunding and… and she feels strange. Funny.  
  
She hears Ms Bran - Julie - tell the others that “Hannah wants to become a writer,” and then she gets asked what she writes and she feels glad that no one else seems to know what… what she did and how can she live that down? Except Julie did just that, and now she’s here, happy, with friends and they’re getting along and no one else seems to mind that she… she used to be a Traditionalist and there’s a whole canteen of people and they’re just people and they’re helping people and...  
  
She answers on autopilot, shrinking in on herself. Maybe it’s the crowds. She hasn’t seen many people for the past two weeks.  
  
Ms Bran, thankfully, notices. “Are you feeling alright?” she asks, reaching out to touch her forehead. “No, you feel cold and clammy. I think you need some air. Sorry, sorry, coming through - incidentally, if you jerks don’t protect my lunch, I’ll… I’ll remember it… coming through…”  
  
It’s quieter outside, and cooler, and Hannah sucks in some air.  
  
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly.  
  
“Oh, it was only lunch,” Ms Bran says with a shrug. “But what was that all about? Was it something someone said?”  
  
“I… I don’t know,” Hannah whispers. “I… it… I just don’t know any more.”

* * *

  
**Day 14**  
  
The man in white sits back in his white leather chair in his spotless white office, and flicks through the print-out. The woman dressed all in grey stands at attention in front of his desk, her hands behind her back.  
  
“Excellent,” he says, after his skim-read. She doesn’t doubt he read every single word. “Processing is going as expected. How long do you believe it will take until this asset can be assigned CLEARED status?”  
  
The woman tilts her head. “Going by reports, we should achieve CLEAR within two weeks,” she says confidently. “We are considering uses for them, and are handling requests from both the Syndicate and the Progenitors for their services.”  
  
The man in white purses his lips. “I think we’ll try to keep this one in-house, don’t you?” he says.  
  
“Very good, sir. I anticipated your orders and have been considering ways to maintain access. I’ll begin implementation once I leave here.”  
  
“Excellent. Oh, and Belfry?”  
  
“Yes, sir?”  
  
“Send my congratulations to the processing team. This has been a well-managed turnaround, despite some initial hold-ups. That will be all.”  
  
“Very good, sir.”


End file.
